A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The forty-fourth post of a series.

My car had its sixteenth MOT this week, if you count each of the five failed tests which were repeated after repairs. These precious failures were attributable to an expired light bulb (twice), a worn tyre, a damaged valve stem, and a corroded brake pipe. I could tell a light bulb from a tyre, but not a valve stem from a brake pipe.

This week, for the first time since 2019, it passed without requiring any repairs.

I visited the celebrated exhibition of the Lindisfarne Gospels at the Laing this week.

The loan of the Gospels from the British Library has been frequently described as a ‘homecoming’. This invites consideration of whether this artefact ought to be returned to the region, a sort of in-country version of the endless debate about return of the treasures the British have stolen over the centuries. The bespoke film installation by Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller seems to play on that theme, and Ruth Ewan’s collection of local ‘treasures’ also seems surprisingly provocative in that context.

I’m not convinced that a Lindisfarne relic being kept in a display case 60 miles from its ‘home’ is all that morally different to it being on display 350 miles from ‘home’. I’m not certain that displaying a religious relic in a secular setting is quite right. But I’m also not certain that modern British Christianity has much in common with the ‘dragons and sea monsters’ version brought to these shores a millennium ago. So, I’m not sure what the answer is to any of this.

Wendy and I inadvertently caught five minutes of the BBC series The Repair Shop this week. It’s an enormously popular programme I really don’t enjoy: it seems to encourage an object-driven sentimentality and nostalgia that I find depressingly backward-looking.

It often feels like the opposite of using the lessons of the past to build the future; it feels like wallowing in rose-tinted recollections, trying to live in a sanitised version of the past, and weirdly accepting credit for things in which only people’s ancestors were involved. This obviously isn’t always true for every item, but (based on my very limited sampling) it does seem to be the dominant tone of the programme.

The bit we saw involved a couple being presented with a restored spinning wheel. Neither of them knew how to use it nor had any practical need of it. Would the world not be a smidgen better if it had, instead, been given to a science museum to support knowledgable presentations on the Industrial Revolution that supplanted it? Would the programme not have been a little more worthy if it looked forward, and talked about protecting our natural resources by managing our old technology responsibly rather than leaving it in a house to degrade for 100 years? Or made a point about the energy intensity of the production of thread, and encouraged us to recycle used textiles?

The skill of the restorers featured in the programme is undeniable, but I find the tone and sentimentality of the programme unappealing.